Christianity and the Axial Age--Part I

Christianity, along with Rabbinic Judaism, and later Islam, is, as Karen Armstrong says in her new book on the Axial Age (The Great Transformation), a manifestation and extension of that earlier era. Each of these later faiths and revelations bring the vision of the Axial Age a step closer to the individual person. A person in his or her ordinary life, say these later traditions, can be influenced by the transformative power that was disclosed to humanity in the Axial Age. The insights of the Axial Age are meant for everyone, not just the seers and the prophets. This is their inherent message, cloaked often under creeds, doctrines and systems of belief, but nonetheless, offered to all.

I would like to examine some of the central, core issues and teaching found in the wisdom of Yeshua and the teachings of early Christianity in a series of posts. In this first post I want to outline what I feel are the key insights brought to humanity in the Axial Age which, in the Semitic world at least, are the gifts of the Prophets, and then carried forward and extended in new ways through Yeshua.

The key breakthrough concerns the Divine Reality itself. God is not a capricious, provincial God, belonging to a few (or a supreme "god" who has superior privilege over a pantheon of gods), the Ultimate Reality is transcendent beyond all categories, unnamable, beyond words, images and language, and yet present to all.

That Reality is a conscious Presence—a great I Am Presence that suffuses all things and is the Source of all. In Creation (Being) and yet beyond-all-Being, this Reality makes “the many” and is the inclusive Oneness in which all things continue to exist.

Everything that is flows out of this Reality, and nothing else than this can ever be. This is a visionary breakthrough into a mystical seeing that envisions the undivided wholeness of Reality, seen and unseen.